


put away childish things

by l_cloudy



Category: Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Coming of Age, F/M, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-29
Updated: 2015-11-29
Packaged: 2018-05-03 21:27:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5307485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/l_cloudy/pseuds/l_cloudy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laral grows up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	put away childish things

When Laral had been a little girl, so young that her nursemaid still let her run about in short trousers and pigtails, it was her left hand she favored.

It had taken people a while to notice. Children were grabby by nature, after all, and Laral herself was more spirited than most, always underfoot, following her father about or sneaking into the kitchen to see what smelled so good. Her knees were always scraped, her cheeks always red, and the entire household knew they’d have a better chance stopping the winds from blowing than stopping Laral from getting someplace she wasn’t supposed to be.

Laral remembered the day Masha decided she was old enough to be taught how to eat properly. She sat Laral at the red table in her rooms with a bowl of rice she had seasoned with a spoonful of a sweet-smelling sauce – _women’s food_ , a special grow-ups treat Laral had only tasted once before. She grabbed the spoon from Masha’s hand, eager to show off. It didn’t seem so hard.

A surprised voice stopped her. “Not your safehand, child,” her nursemaid said. “The other one.”

Laral frowned. Masha wore a glove over her safehand, as did every other woman in the house, and never used it to eat; but Laral had never thought that had anything to do with her. Lighteyed women didn’t wear gloves, one of Father’s ardents had explained to her once, but Laral wouldn’t really know. She had never seen a lighteyed woman before.

So she tried to do what Masha said, to hold her spoon with the other hand, but it felt odd and awkward and it kept slipping and it _wasn’t fair_ , that she had to keep struggling and failing this way, when the other hand would be so much easier…

“Laral.” Masha said. Sterner, this time. “Your freehand. Now.”

And Laral tried, she truly did, but somehow her grip was never as steady as it could be. Masha send for Father, shaking her head the whole time, mumbling under her breath about how could no one have realized before, but maybe it was only to be expected with Laral growing up without a mother as she had. It was _unholy_ , Masha said, looking at Laral as if she’d never seen her before in her life.

When Father came in he was looking a bit sour, but then he smiled at Laral as he put one arm around her shoulders and told her that now was time to be as good girl and as bright as he knew she could be; and they would play a game, and Laral was not to use her safehand anymore – not only for eating, but for everything – until she learned how to do the same with her right hand as well. It didn’t sound like a difficult game at all, and Laral smiled back at Father and said that sure, she could do that. She could do anything.

That night at dinner she was attended by Tal, Father’s senior ardent, and she burned two prayers before tying Laral’s left hand behind her back with a rope made of cloth.

“Just in case,” Tal said.

And she did it again the following morning, for the whole day; and every morning after that until Laral turned six.

**

When the day came from Laral to learn how to read and write, she wouldn’t let Tal teach her. Nor she would let Brother Vashnoi or Brother Sarin, and Masha could not read and write well enough to be a proper tutor. Father didn’t have a primary scribe since Mother’s death, except for his ardents, but Laral just… couldn’t. The ardents had burned prayers every day since she had been a little girl, begging the Almighty to heal her, and tied her left arm behind her back every time.

In the end, Father sent for a woman from the town to be Laral’s teacher. She was the wife of Lirin the surgeon, who was often at the manor during most of Father’s coughing spells, and occasionally even for meals. The woman's name was Hesina. She wasn’t pretty, but there was something stunning in her high cheekbones and quick smile, and she had a no-nonsense manner that Laral found intriguing and frustrating at the same time.

On the first day of Laral’s new lessons, her safehand itched at the sight of Hesina’s pen running so smoothly on the paper. When she’d first been taught glyphs, Laral had felt ten times more awkward holding a brush with her freehand as she did with a spoon of a needle. Her glyphwards were still slanted and imprecise, no matter how many times she tried.

Hesina met Laral’s eyes. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve been told of your… habit.” She didn’t say the word as if it were something blasphemous or unnatural, but just a simple fact of Laral’s body. “But women’s script is much simpler to learn, and it’s far the most useful talent to have.”

Laral smiled back, grateful.

Later on, sometimes, she found herself wondering if this was how having a mother would feel like.

Hesina was a mother herself, Laral knew, with two children closer to her own age. They were both boys, and maybe that was why they didn’t seem to mind the long hours Hesina spent in the manor up the hill.

If it had been her, Laral was sure she would never have wanted to share her her mother with anyone – except with her bother, of course, but Laral did not know how it was like to have a brother either. Lukal had died of the lung fever a few weeks before his eleventh Weeping, carried by the winds only days before Brightness Savah, Laral’s mother. She had been too young to remember, too young even to crawl, but Father’d had bad coughs ever since, and no one ever entered the bedroom with the red door anymore.

**

Laral had completely mastered the art of women’s script by the time she was eight, as every good lady should, and started taking on some of Father’s ardents’ script duties soon after. She enjoyed books, the way a simple turn of the page would transport her half a world away; and sometimes she would sit by the hearth, reading aloud to her father and to herself, and all would be wonderful.

That year she left Hearthstone for the first time, for the town of Javash, Highlord Amaram’s seat. Father had business to conduct, whatever those might have been, and Laral herself only laid eyes on the Highlord once in the entire trip, trying to decide if truly Amaram looked like the hero everyone said he was.

On the fourth day Father allowed Laral to go visit a menagerie, as long as Masha would take care to bring her back before it got too late, and it was the oddest collection of wonders Laral had ever seen. Later they had sweet peppers and a thick herbs-scented soup for a meal, and the day seemed as though it couldn’t get any better when Father presented Laral with three new sets of clothes – an apology, he said, for having cut their trip short; they were to depart again very early in the morning.

At the time Laral was too absorbed in her happiness to notice, but Father had a dark frown on his face for the entire way back, and they were never invited to Highlord Amaram’s lands again.

Shortly after returning home, Laral asked Father permission to go visit Hearthstone like she had Javash, maybe with Hesina accompanying her. She had been to the town before, of course, but only in few occasions, and the rarity had made her the center of everyone’s attention. As much as Laral had loved the novelty of Javash, it had been the crowds she had enjoyed the most, and all the things she’d got to observe when no one had paid any attention to her.

Back in Hearthstone, Masha didn’t see with a good eye the idea of Laral going around by herself, or playing with the town children. The girls would resent her, she insisted, and she had her husband Miliv explain how all the boys were loud and dirty and too rough for her. But it didn’t seem fair that Laral had no knowledge of the town her family had been called to protect and rule over.

Hesina, on the other hand, was more than happy to have Laral visit her a few times a week, and she told Father so. Lately the two hadn’t got much time together; not since Laral’s schooling had progressed to the point where she needed more practice and fewer lessons to improve, and Hesina herself was absorbed in the education of her older son, who apparently showed a greater talent for surgery than Lirin himself had ever seen.

Soon enough, Laral decided she liked Hesina’s sons. The second son, Tien, was maybe two years younger than her, with an unruly mop of black and brown hair atop his head and a bright smile that must come from his mother. Kal, the surgeon’s apprentice, was the same age as Laral, dark and quiet.

On that first day, Hesina asked Laral to help her around the kitchen, and it turned out that helping prepare a meal was nowhere as simple as she had expected. Not that she was allowed to; the only time she’d sneaked in the kitchen before mealtime, Barm the chef had rolled his eyes and told Laral she was only getting in the way, before sending for Masha to fetch her and send her to her rooms to be instructed on proper behavior.

Apparently, Laral learnt, making the flame stronger would get food to cook faster, but it wouldn’t taste as good. And she always had to stir _a lot_.

“What are you doing?”

It was a boy's voice.

Father hadn’t given permission for her to go outside about the town, not yet, but Hesina had promised she’d talk him into it. In the meanwhile, that left Laral in the house, in the company of two other children she didn’t know.

Laral turned. It had been Kal who’d spoke, the older, silent one. He was frowning at her as if she were the strangest thing he’d ever seen in his kitchen – and that probably wasn’t far from the truth.

“I’m cooking,” she said, defensive. She wanted to add, _you silly_ , but she didn’t.

The boy took a few steps closer, narrowing his eyes. “That’s not how Mother does it,” he said. “You’re making a mess.”

Laral glared at him. Sure, her stirs with the big wooden spoon weren’t as smooth as Hesina’s had been, nor as slow and confident. But she was still learning, after all.

“I’m not!” she spat, indignant. Sure, there was some sup splattered close to the edge of the pan, and some drops had even fallen on the floor. But it was hardly _a mess_. “Besides, this is the first time I’m doing it,” Laral said. “I bet you weren’t born knowing how to fix people up, were you?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” another voice said. “Kal makes even a bigger mess every time he even gets close to the fire.” This was the other boy, Tien, Hesina’s youngest. His eyes were warm. “Are you going to be eating with us?”

Laral nodded. “Your mother invited me. She’s nice.” She felt stupid adding that last part – it was _their_ mother, of course the boys would think highly of her– but she felt like she had to say it. Had Laral been in their place, she would have wanted people to say good things about her mother.

Tien smiled. “You seem nice, too,” he said. “I like your hair.”

Laral brought one hand up to the blonde streaks in her hair, self-conscious. Mother’s hair had been more golden than black; her own lighter stripes were scarcer, but still obvious. No one in Hearthstone had hair like hers, not even Father. It set her apart.

“Thank you…” Laral trailed off.

Kal cleared his throat. “I like you hair, too.” His voice was almost defiant. “It looks nice.” He was blushing, and only then Laral understood that he’d been as embarrassed about meeting her than she herself was.

Then she realized that the soup would burn unless she kept stirring, and went back to the fire.

But from that day on, Laral wasn’t as lonely anymore.

**

It wasn’t long before Laral started running around with Kal and his brother, and the enthusiastic tiredness she felt in the evenings was more than enough to make up for Masha’s sourness. Her nurse still didn’t much like the idea of Laral mingling with the darkeyed children, no matter how many times she explained that Lirin and his family were second nahn – perfectly suitable company even for Father – and that all the other children usually stayed well clear of them. In fact, Laral sometimes wished Hesina had a daughter she could spend time with; all of her storybooks were full of tales of sisters and close friends, and she couldn’t help but wonder how that’d be like.

Still, life just got a lot more exciting. She spent her days running down from the hilltops and playing pretend and poking at rockbuds with long sticks, to see how long they’d take to pull on themselves. Kal liked to make a contest of it, as well as of grabbing grass. He had lightning-quick reflexes, and it irked Laral to no end that she could almost never manage it. t had seemed such a stupid thing to do at first, playing with _plants_ , until she’d realized just how hard it was. And Laral Wistion would never let herself be outsmarted by grass, of all things.

With Tien she went exploring; she’d never imagined there could be so many kinds of birds or stones or roots, until he pointed it out. After being out all morning, they would sit under the scarce darewillow trees, and look at the clouds running through the sky. Sometimes they would talk; Tien told her all about the places he wanted to visit, and Laral would talk about the newest book she’d read and the ones Father was having shipped to Hearthstone – from as far as Jah Keved! – for her next birthday. Tien said he wanted to be a merchant when he grew up, travel the world and bring a little bit of foreignness into everyone’s home. Many children from the village resented being confined to their small town, he explained, and wished their families had the right of travel, and maybe they wouldn’t be as sad if Tien could bring them beautiful things from all over the world.

That made Laral smile.

It was only the two of them most of the times, laying under the darewillows, for Kal was often busy with his lessons. He spent so much times on these – more time than Laral even spent on hers, even if reading books was fun and didn’t actually count as lessons anyway; and _way_ more time that she’d ever imagined a boy or a man would spend on learning, and a darkeyed one at that.

It had been stupid of her; of course she has known that Lirin was a learned man, with a keenness of mind that rivaled Father’s. But still it was so _odd_. And how strange it would be to learn from books one could not read, how awkward. Lirin had many books about the human body, its illness and their remedies, and the pictures were beautifully done and incredibly detailed, well-marked with glyphs – but he needed his wife to know what everything meant.

She wasn’t sure she liked it. Oh, Hesina and her husband worked well together; but Laral knew there were many men who only married to have a faithful scribe at their side, often older men who’d already been married before, with children older than Laral was. She’d heard that enough from Tal or Vashnoi or even Miliv, Father’s steward, who all urged him to take a second wife. Father refused for this very reason, saying it wouldn’t be fair to his new bride, and Laral herself found everything so confusing. She knew she must marry at some point, but she didn’t want it to be like that.

That was, of course, before Laral realized she was to marry Kal.

It was Father who brought it up, one day shortly after Laral’s twelfth birthday. They were eating lunch together in Father’s sitting room, only the two of them; Father with a blanket thrown over his shoulders, Laral wearing a new glove on her safehand. Soon she’d have to start wearing dresses with a longer cuff on the left side, but it still seemed so unpractical. Even after all her practice, she still had to fight the urge to do things with her safehand instead of her right.

The room was in the western side of the mansion, light streaming in golden stripes all over the table, and Father looked better than he had in a while. He did the talking, mostly, about his new axehounds and the market season and how he was thinking of getting Laral a proper tutor – and from Kholinar, even! Then he started asking questions.

He asked Laral how she was, which seemed silly at first – he saw her every day, and every day she did the same things – and she wondered where he was trying to get to. Then he asked what she thought about ‘young Kaladin’, which made Laral blink. No one called Kal ‘Kaladin’, and sometimes she almost forgot that was his name. Father talked about the boy with fondness, even if they barely knew each other, repeating facts he must surely have asked Kal’s parents about.

After all he was always close friends with Lirin, despite their difference in status, and always seemed to treat Hesina with the uttermost respect, as if she were an equal. Surely it was expected he would take pride in their son’s accomplishment, Laral thought, as Father went on about Kal’s virtues – about how he was intelligent and talented, and he would go far in life. It made Laral happy to hear Father speak of her friend in such a way – she knew what the villagers’ children thought of him – but she couldn’t help the thought that maybe Father wouldn’t care so much about Lirin’s son if he had a son of his own still living.

In the end, Father’s reasoning made sense. Laral liked Kal a lot and she liked her; he would be very respected one day, and rich. Laral herself could not inherit her family’s estate, only his possessions; unless she married a man with no other territories of his own and had a son before Father’s death – then the Highprince might appoint her husband as citylord while the boy reached his majority. It was unlikely in the best of cases, and would never happen if she married Kal.

If she did, people would constantly wonder what was wrong with her, for not being able to attract a man of her social class. Her children might be one-eyes – or darkeyed even; sometimes that happened – and life wouldn’t be anything like the simple, linear tales in her story books.

Which was not to say she didn’t like the idea. Kal was handsome; she’d seen the village girls laugh giggle when he passed by. He was kind and smart and she already liked his family almost as much as if they were her own. Laral thought it over many times, until she felt like she’d finally found the perfect solution. There was a story in her book about a young hero falling in love with a fair-skinned beauty, but her eyes were the dark violet color of Veden peasantry, and his family would not let them marry. In the end, the prince had gone to the Nightwatcher and had his beloved’s eyes changed for his boon, and bearing his curse with pride in his love. The young prince lost his sight in exchange, but he married his love and they lived forever after.

Not that Laral would be as silly as to do something like _that_. She wasn’t a child anymore, too old to believe in the Nightwatcher of all things – but Kal could become a lighteye, in the same way every man could. If only he would go to war, he could win a Shardblade. He was strong and smart and quick on his feet; if any man alive could win a Shardblade, Laral knew Kal could.

That he was to go study in Kharbranth was only a minor obstacle. She would talk him into going to war, and Kal could become a lighteye so they could marry and be happy together.

Then Father died and childhood ended.

**

The days after her father’s death passed by in a blur.

It didn’t feel real – it was all a dream, a horrible dream that would end soon. One morning she would wake up and Father would be in his study, reading a book, or playing cards with Lirin in the sitting room; it couldn’t been otherwise. Everything had been so sudden – one day Father was alive and well, if coughing; the next he was cold and dead, a trail of blood running from his lips. Lirin would know what the reason was, what had made Father get so sick so fast, but Lirin was not in favor at the manor at the moment.

In fact, the surgeon wasn’t in favor anywhere. Father had sent out his ardents and his steward at the end, and willed Lirin a goblet full of spheres – but he had been too weak to hold the pen himself, and the document was contested. As if the entirety of Hearthstone didn’t know how close Lirin and Father had been, as if a handful of spheres would make a dent in her family’s holdings. It was Laral’s fortune now, after all, and she didn’t mind; but everyone else seemed to on her account, and she was too confused and scared to try anything at the moment.

Father was gone. Her only family – the man who kissed her on the forehead every morning and had carried her on his shoulders when she’d been little, who bought Laral trinkets and books and dresses to make her smile, and rejected marriage alliances for a family of lower station so that she would be happy.

She didn’t much feel like eating anymore. Her tutor had finally arrived – Brightness Kaleen from the Kholin princedom, stately and educated and everything a proper Vorin lady should be like – but Laral did not feel like studying either. The only thing she wanted was to go outside the town, away from the house her father had died in, to take long walks and forget herself; but it was forbidden.

Sleeping all day was the next best thing.

The man who was to take her father’s place arrived months after the burial, proud and resentful enough for three men, and Laral didn’t think much of him. Truly she didn’t think much of anything these days, but Brightlord Roshone had nothing singular about him, except his extremely sour attitude. He wore a sword and ill-fitting warrior’s garbs, and seemed to perpetually scow at everything – the town, the people, Laral herself.

Brightlord Roshone was from Kholinar, as he felt fit to repeat not less than seventeen times that first week, and didn’t much like the change. The hillfolk was lazy and stupid, he complained; Laral herself was a ‘dumb peasant girl’, and he didn’t bother making sure she was out of earshot before saying that. Truth be told, he didn’t even seem to think much of women in general; he even made sure to have is scribing done by the male ardents.

His son Rillir, by contrast, was quieter. He seemed to dislike his new situation as much as Roshone did, but he apparently blamed his father more than he did fate. Roshone was Brightlord Amaram’s second cousin and one of his closest living relations – which explained how he’d been named citylord even after whatever disgrace had befallen him in the capital – but he was still impoverished, and plainly accustomed to a lifestyle he could no longer afford.

Laral was thirteen when she was told she would marry Rillir in four years’ time.

She didn’t mind. Rillir was close to her age and handsome to look at, and he always made an effort to keep his and his father’s sour attitudes under control whenever he was around her. He was good company in her renewed loneliness, after Roshone had dismissed Brightness Kaleen a few months after his arrival. He’d complained about the expense – for all that it was Laral’s inheritance paying for her tutor, he was the one who controlled it, and he had his own ideas about which expenses were fit for a young lady and which ones were not. Masha hadn’t been an interesting enough company since Laral had been a child and, besides, she had her own family to think of. Rillir paid close attention to her and sometimes tried to make her laugh, and for all Laral suspected his kindness was more out of necessity than character, maybe it would turn into habit by the time they were married.

One of such expenses her guardian considered suitable had been a young mare – plainly an excuse to buy a mount each for Roshone and his son, to act as escorts, paid for with Father’s inheritance; but still a wonderful gift all the same. Rillir taught her how to ride, and it was the most beautiful gift she’d ever received. Laral could spend hours and hours trotting through the hills, and it was a whole new world, only hers – a world where she was the only living soul, and nothing mattered but her grip on the reins and the disappearing grass and the birds in the sky.

She missed Hesina. Laral tried not to think about it – it was better for everyone – but still she did. When she read a new book or thought of a new joke she would’ve liked to share. When she wore a dress that looked similar to one she’d had when she’d been younger, and maybe she might have worn it that one time for Lirin’s birthday meal at their house – when she smelled spices that reminded her of the small kitchen where she’d tried to learn to cook, or saw an oddly-shaped cloud that looked like one Tien had pointed out to her once.

Laral thought of Tien a lot, every time she went out riding and saw the darewillows that reminded her of their long talks; and thought of Kal even often, more and more as her relationship with Rillir changed. What would’ve been like if it had been Kal instead? As she grew older she almost never found herself alone with Rillir – there were always some of his father’s guards, or Masha, or one of the ardents – but he did kiss her a few times; and if it wasn’t quite like her stories, she couldn’t help but wonder how Kal’s lips would’ve felt against hers.

It didn’t matter anyway. Brightlord Roshone was still relentless in his accusations of thievery against Lirin – as if the man was suspected of stealing King Gavilar’s crown and not just a handful of spheres – and Laral suspected the man had told his family to avoid angering the citylord further at all costs. Neither Kal nor Tien had ever come to visit her, not even in those dark months immediately after Father’s death, and Laral had long since decided that certain memories were best left alone. Some people were just not intended for each other anyway.

**

Rillir died, eventually, as everyone around Laral seemed to.

He went out for a hunt and came back a mangled corpse. There was blood everywhere, redder than she’d ever imagined it could be, and the _smell_ of it was overpowering – it mixed with that of burned flesh in Lirin’s surgery room, impregnating her nostrils, her clothes, her screams. Later that night she washed her hair four times and still could not get rid of the awful scent – and every time she closed her eyes she could see Rillir’s own, sliced through, and the way his leg had just been… ripped away.

It was the worst kind of nightmare.

Why did everyone have to die, every single person that even came close to her? Was Laral cursed, condemned to live out the rest of her days utterly alone?

She was vaguely aware of someone stroking her hair, handing her a cup of something hot. She’d screamed herself hoarse, and her hands trembled. As she fell asleep, Laral dreamed it was her mother who held her – but of course it was only Hesina, who’d stayed behind as her husband and son took care to have Roshone brought to his bed without bleeding out. Laral didn’t have a mother, of course; she was dead. Dead like Father, gone somewhere she could not follow.

**

The next few weeks were very quiet.

She wrote a letter to Hesina, as it was only proper, to thank her for her husband’s effort in saving the citylord’s life, but mostly for herself. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had been so kind to her as Hesina had been in those last terrible moments outside the surgery room. Roshone, for his part, had turned his grief into anger at the man he claimed let his son die, but Laral had seen Rillir right after the accident, and even then she’d known there was no saving him. She briefly wondered if she should mention Kal in her letter, but in the end decided not to.

Laral remembered with some guilt the night they’d seen each other, when Kal and Lirin had come to dinner at the manor, and the betrayed look on his face when Rillir had started insulting him. Truth be told, she’d been a bit angry at Kal at the time – as if he’d actually expect Laral to take his side against that of the man she was to marry, whom she had to see and talk to every day, depending on his kindness and his whims; but of course Kal had a father and a mother and a family, and he couldn’t understand how Laral’s life was – but now she mostly felt shame. If someone had treated her like Rillir – and Laral herself – had treated Kal, she didn’t think she would’ve been as ready to help as Kal had been on that terrible night.

They buried Rillir not far from where Father was, and Laral cried the entire time. She didn’t want to do that anymore, the loss, the feeling of aimlessly as she waited to find out what would happen to her now. Rillir hadn’t been the most thoughtful man, but he’d been fun and daring and _there,_ the closest hope for stability Laral had. And now he was gone.

Within weeks, the world started to change around her. The king was dead as well, betrayed and killed by a mysterious assassin whom no Blade could touch, and Alethkar went to war.

As for Laral herself, she suddenly found she was to marry a man who only weeks before had liked to style himself her father – and on their engagement day, he sent a little boy to his death merely out of spite.

**

Laral Wistiow was married two months after her sixteenth birthday, as she originally should have, not to the son but to the father. Rillir had been dead almost a year; Tien only four months.

She had cried when she’d heard the news, not as much as she’d cried for Rillir, but her tears were more sincere. Laral had liked Tien for who he was, not what he meant for her; he’d been a kind boy, a bright spark of sunlight even among the darkest clouds. He shouldn’t have died that way.

Even her husband-to-be had shown the barest hint of regret, self-satisfied smirk giving way to a shadow of doubt – or maybe it was the way Laral had looked at him across the dining table; she hadn’t been completely able to hide her disgust. She’d wondered, briefly, where Kal was – but that kind of thoughts could never lead to anything. She had to be confident he would do well; he was smart and strong, and could keep himself alive.

Had Laral been braver she would’ve gone to visit Hesina, to repay the favor she’d done to her, but they probably wouldn’t have wanted to see her in the first place. She didn’t think she could stand having Hesina’s door slammed on her face.

So Laral had a prayer burned for Tien – and a smaller one for Kal, wherever he was – and many, many others for her marriage. She needed all the help she could get.

She had no idea what to expect from Roshone as a husband. In the years since he’d come to Hearthstone, they had barely interacted – he was still so disdainful of everything around him, and didn’t seem to think much of Laral in the first place. The only things he cared about had been his spurned honor and his son, and now she had no idea where she stood.

Her wedding ceremony was short. It was a feast day in Hearthstone, the entire town singing the lord’s praises for a day of rest and a free banquet of the finest foods, but none of that reached the manor. They were barely out of mourning and, besides, there wasn’t much to be excited about. Laral was married behind closed doors – her decision, and it took very little to talk Roshone into agreeing. She didn’t much want to put on a show.

Laral had no family, of course – wasn’t her wedding because of that in the first place? – and none of her new husband’s high-ranking friends had bothered to make the trip north from Kholinar. . If Roshone still had friends; Laral wasn’t sure. He had barely received any missives since all the condolences for Rillir’s death.

Amaram stood for her at the wedding – their only guest, and a sharp reminder that the man who _should_ have stood in her father’s place was the one she was to wed. She hadn’t met the Highlord since that one time with Father, years ago – except for the day he’d come to recruit for the army, but he wouldn’t talk about that. Laral wanted to know how the war was going, were they really fighting _Parshmen_? That was unlike any other war story she had ever heard. Was Amaram fighting on the Shattered Plains with the new king and his Highprinces? It must be so, but she had heard that Tien had been killed at the border with Jah Keved.

He was tight-lipped about it all, though. He wouldn’t say much except how big of a loss King Gavilar’s death had been for Alethkar and the entire of Roshar, but Amaram refused to discuss military matters with a woman on her wedding day. Such crude matters would undoubtedly ruin her happiness, he said. Laral just stared. Surely Amaram must know her marriage wasn’t born of love.

But apparently on that day everyone seemed happy to pretend. Tal gave her blessing – the Almighty’s blessing – on her marriage, might it be long and thriving and loving. Masha coed as she helped Laral get ready, chatting the whole time about how excited she must be, as if she’d not been engaged to Roshone’s _son_ only months before. Why wouldn’t anyone acknowledge that? She was once again grateful that the wedding was private. She didn’t think she could’ve handled the villagers’ pity at seeing what a farce the day was.

The night came too soon, but she was expecting it. Years ago Laral had been instructed in the matters of the marriage bed after assisting to one of Kal’s lessons – Hesina had drawn her aside and explained the whole thing in painstaking, clinical details. It had been one long afternoon, and much more instructive than what her father’s ardents had told her; Laral had always assumed Kal had got the same talk from his father at the same time, because he wouldn’t look at her in the face for days after they were let go.

She wasn’t expecting it to be so uncomfortable. It was clear her new husband wasn’t perfectly at ease himself – maybe the full extent of their situation had finally struck him, marrying a girl he’d had a hand in raising. The awkwardness was palpable, almost too much to stand; but Roshone needed a heir, now more than always, and so he came to her night after night after night.

Laral almost stopped thinking about all the different ways everything could’ve gone.

Her first child was born two months before her eighteenth birthday. It was not the son her husband expected but a girl, red and wrinkled with a full head of Alethi-black hair, not a lock of blonde to be seen. Laral named her Savah for her mother, put her in the bedroom with the red door that had belonged to her brother Lukal, and didn’t take her eyes off the little girl for one moment. Her husband may grumble about it, but then again, he was mostly content to let Laral do as she pleased as long their paths didn’t cross.

It was, Laral came to think, an ideal arrangement; at least for the moment. Who knew, maybe one day things would change. Highlord Amaram hadn’t seemed unkind – maybe one day, after the war, he might invite them to visit, if only for her children’s education. Or Roshone might be recalled to Kholinar one day, or perhaps he would just stopped caring about her, especially after she gave him a son. She might still get to travel, see the world, live fully as she never had.

 _And if not_ , Laral found herself thinking sometimes, when the loneliness and the melancholy of it all became unbearable. Her husband had never really recovered from the hunting incident, both in body and spirit, and he _was_ much older than her.

She thought of these things at night, then immediately felt a bad taste in her mouth – did this make a bad person, Laral wondered, wishing her husband’s death? She didn’t mean to be cruel. She just wanted him to _go away_ , to have her life become her own for once.

Little Savah helped. She was beautiful, of course, with curious green eyes and little grabby hands; always moving, always alert. Laral loved her more than anything, more than she’d ever imagined one could love another human being. She had never really thought about becoming a mother until it happened – even after she’d long realized that her life had been snatched out of her hands to be shaped by others, she’d never expected it would ever actually come to _this_ , mother to a young child when she was still one herself – but there was a certain balance to it, in the way Laral had been given this little girl to raise and protect and love, a little girl like she herself had been once. There was no going back but maybe – just maybe – she could make tomorrow a little better.

In time, Laral stopped wondering about the different life she could have had. This one was enough.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there! (All four of you actually reading this story, probably). I'm super-nervous about posting this, and I really hope you enjoyed it. I LOVE Laral and she deserves the world tbh. 
> 
> come fangirl with me @[tumblr](http://darthrey.tumblr.com/) if that's your thing.


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